Roper arrived with O’Grady, having got off the train at the next stop after Hag Fold, which was Daisy Hill, catching the next service the other way, and being collected by O’Grady at Swinton. Bernie Stone, meanwhile – ‘that fat bastard with the beard,’ as McCracken had called him – who’d been working that morning on another target, had arrived five minutes earlier, and was waiting for them in nondescript, paint-stained overalls.

O’Grady said nothing, but unzipped the bag in stern, humourless fashion, one by one laying the elastic-banded blocks of twenties on the bonnet of his Golf. It was all there, two hundred Gs, as agreed for a first payment. He divided the take three ways, but still didn’t speak.

‘Something wrong?’ Roper asked. ‘You didn’t say a dicky-bird all the way over here. You seemed a bit off yesterday as well, at the meeting.’

O’Grady gave him a look that could have cut glass. ‘Nothing’s fucking wrong, okay?’

‘Okay.’ Roper shrugged. ‘But you can smile, you know. This is looking good.’

‘Hey!’ O’Grady pointed at his face. ‘I choose when and where I’m happy, okay? If I decide the world’s a fucked-up place, with fucked-up idiots on every side of me, I reserve the right to reflect it, yeah?’

After he was done with Roper and Stone, O’Grady drove back to Long Acre. It was now mid-afternoon, so the working day wasn’t officially done, but he still found it hard to concentrate. He went back into the office, changed into his suit and tie, and then sat there and stewed for another two hours. His share of the cash, £66,000, sat on the desk in front of him in Dean Chesham’s sports bag. He didn’t bother putting it into the company’s hidden safe or entering the details into the encrypted ledger on his laptop. He didn’t even bother counting it again, which was his usual habit.

At around five o’clock, he left the office with money in hand, crossed the Acre, unlocked the side-door and went down the steps into the garage below. Ordinarily tonight they’d celebrate. Megan, adopting her usual ‘ask no questions and I’ll be told no lies’ approach, would repay him three times over when they got back from the slap-up meal at whichever expensive restaurant he took her to. But this evening everything was inverted. That money might as well have been burning a hole in the bag and spilling out. Because it wasn’t his any more. At least, half of it wasn’t … maybe considerably more than half.

‘Bastards!’ he said under his breath, so infuriated that he didn’t immediately notice when the motion-sensitive light didn’t come on.

That only struck him when he was halfway across the open space to his car.

He halted, skin suddenly prickling.